It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Netflix announced its most financially ambitious feature film so far, The Gray Man, based on the series of bestselling novels by Mark Greaney. Set to star Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, the project follows ex-CIA operative turned freelance assassin, Court Gentry (Gosling) as he is pursued by an old colleague, now nemesis, Lloyd Hansen (Evans). Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers who helmed several critically and commercially successful Marvel Studios films with Evans (including 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier) will direct.
James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming up to revive the vintage crime fighter, The Shadow, in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen. Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown and Company will publish the original series, whose first installment is due out in the fall of 2021. The Shadow, an iconic New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles, and in 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.
Jon Hamm is set to star in and produce a feature film reboot of Fletch, the brazen investigative reporter from Gregory Mcdonald’s 1970s and 1980s Fletch mystery novels. The new film adaptation will specifically be based on the second book in the Mcdonald series, Confess, Fletch. In a mysterious chain of wild events, Fletch finds himself in the middle of multiple murders, one of which implicates him as a prime suspect. While on a quest to prove his innocence, Fletch is tasked with finding his fiancée’s stolen art collection, the only inheritance she’s acquired after her father goes missing and is presumed dead. Zev Borow, consulting producer of the Lethal Weapon TV series, will be penning the feature adaptation.
Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, creators of the hit BBC drama, The Salisbury Poisonings, have been attached to direct the feature film, Chasing Agent Freegard, a thriller starring James Norton. The movie is written by Captain Phillips co-producer Michael Bronner and is based on the gripping true story of con man Robert Hendy-Freegard (Norton), who masqueraded as an MI5 agent and manipulated and threatened multiple people into going underground for fear of assassination.
Tyler Posey (MTV’s Teen Wolf) has signed on to star opposite Lelia Symington in Brut Force, the first feature from writer-director Eve Symington. The film follows Sloane (Lelia Symington), a reporter who returns to her rural California hometown to investigate harassment of local vineyard workers, uncorking a tangled web of crime, corruption, and murder behind wine country’s shiny façade. Posey will play the love interest and "homme fatale." Vico Escorcia (History’s Texas Rising) will also co-star as the missing girl and catalyst to the neo-noir tale.
Clerkenwell Films has optioned the TV rights for Rewind by Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard. Rewind is a psychological thriller that begins with a murder being captured on film, before jumping back in time to reveal the events leading up to the crime.
The Kourosh Ahari-directed psychological thriller, The Night, has landed a license for theatrical release in Iran. This is a historic benchmark for the country’s filmmaking community as it is the first U.S.-produced film to receive a license for theatrical release in Iran since the revolution.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
The Quinn Colson novels by Ace Atkins are being developed as a TV series at HBO. In the books, Colson is a former Army Ranger who returns to his home in rural northeast Mississippi only to discover it's been overrun with corruption, drugs, and violence. In addition to writing the Quinn Colson novel series, Atkins also took over Robert B. Parker’s Spenser character following Parker’s death in 2010, with one novel adapted into the Mark Wahlberg-Winston Duke film, Spenser Confidential.
Grantchester is coming back for a sixth season after British broadcaster ITV and PBS Masterpiece renewed the drama and announced it will start shooting in September (and could become one of the first big British scripted series to return). The show, set in the quaint but crime-ridden village of Grantchester, England, follows the investigations of an unlikely pairing: a detective (Robson Green) and a vicar (Tom Brittney, who took over from James Norton in the role).
Alejandro Amenábar, the Oscar-winning director behind The Others and The Sea Inside, is to make his first-ever television drama for AMC and Spain’s pay-TV broadcaster Movistar+, adapting Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral’s graphic novel, El Tesoro del Cisne Negro (The Treasure Of The Black Swan). The story centers on young diplomat Alex Ventura who teams with a combative public official and a brilliant American lawyer to recover treasure stolen by Frank Wild, who travels the world plundering historic items from the ocean.
Des, ITV’s drama starring David Tennant as British serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, has been acquired by a number of international broadcasters and streamers, including AMC Networks’ Sundance channel. Des follows Nilsen’s unraveling from the point of his arrest to his trial, and is based on the Brian Masters book, Killing For Company, which attempted to get inside the mind of the killer. Masters is a central character in ITV’s drama and is played by The Crown's Jason Watkins. Line Of Duty actor Daniel Mays also stars as Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.
Author Chris Bohjalian's suspense novel, The Red Lotus, has been optioned to be developed into a drama series with Kate Brooke (A Discovery of Witches, Bancroft) attached to pen the adaptation and serve as the showrunner. The Red Lotus follows Alexis, a young ER doctor in New York whose boyfriend goes missing while on vacation in Vietnam. As a result, she uses her own deductive reasoning and expertise as an emergency room medical professional to embark on an international manhunt.
The Rosario Dawson-starring drama, Briarpatch, is not returning for a second season after the USA Network cancelled the show. Based on the Ross Thomas novel, Briarpatch follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), a dogged investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt hometown to its knees. The series also starred Jay R. Ferguson, Brian Geraghty, Edi Gathegi, Kim Dickens, Alan Cumming, and Ed Asner.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
Debbi Mack interviewed police reporter turned crime writer, Mark S. Bacon, on the Crime Cafe podcast.
Writer Types co-host, Halley Sutton (The Lady Upstairs), joined Eric Beetner to chat with SA Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland) and SC Perkins (Lineage Most Lethal).
Read or Dead hosts, Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham, caught up on the news they missed, including lawsuits featuring Dan Brown and the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate, and read some locked room mysteries in honor of not leaving their homes.
Meet the Thriller Author welcomed former orthopedic surgeon John Bishop, who writes the Doc Brady Medical Thriller series.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club chatted with D.C. Alexander, a former federal agent whose debut novel, The Legend of Devil's Creek, was a #1 Amazon Kindle best seller.
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